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60-Year-Old Glass Technology Finds Its Market
In the 1950s, Corning developed a glass product for which it has been trying to find a market ever since. What is now being called "Gorilla Glass" is currently worth $170M/yr. and is poised to quadruple (potentially) in the next year or two. Gorilla Glass is used on many smartphones including Motorola's Droid. ("Whether Apple Inc. uses the glass in its iPod is a much-discussed mystery since 'not all our customers allow us to say,' said [the] general manager of Corning's specialty materials division.") "Because Gorilla is very hard to break, dent or scratch, Corning is betting it will be the glass of choice as TV-set manufacturers dispense with protective rims or bezels for their sets, in search of an elegant look. Gorilla is two to three times stronger than chemically strengthened versions of ordinary soda-lime glass, even when just half as thick, company scientists say. Its strength also means Gorilla can be thinner than a dime, saving on weight and shipping costs. Corning is in talks with Asian manufacturers to bring Gorilla to the TV market in early 2011..." The Christian Science Monitor elaborates on the theme of job growth outside the US, as Corning plans to invest several hundred million dollars to retrofit an LCD plant in Shizuoka, Japan to manufacture the glass. The company will also expand the workforce in the Kentucky plant that now manufactures Gorilla Glass.
It is rare these days to see companies devote 10% of their budget to R&D. Most tend to just not bother with R&D because it doesn't give ROI this quarter, and when they do, they gain the technology by buying a startup, or just copying someone else's work and improving on it.
60 year old glass? Most enterprises can't even think past the next couple quarters or to the next FY, much less this far. Almost any other company would have long since chucked the manufacturing process for it because it wasn't immediately profitable.
I don't know what's more amazing, the glass or the fact a modern company invests 10% of its revenue into R&D with the patience to wait tens of years until their is a market and then quickly capitalises on that.
Might have to buy some stock!
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I am surprised, though, that corning never managed to sell any serious quantity as a structural material. Glass-coated skyscrapers have been considered quite stylish for decades, and I'd imagine that "resists birdstrike, rocks, wind forces, and idiots leaning against the windows just as well as ordinary glass, at 20% the weight" would be a selling point.
Not to mention, if this had been around back in '86 Scotty could've used sheets of this to build the tank for those humpback whales; instead he had to reveal the formula for transparent aluminum in exchange for sheets of heavy, 6"-thick plexiglass!